The Stars Askew (45 page)

A candle was lit in a nearby room, and Max wondered who he had awoken. A window opened and a guard looked out, right in time for a dagger to drive directly into his eye, thrown by Kata below. He had forgotten how much of a killer she was. The man leaned back, as if someone had slapped him, raised a hand to where the dagger emerged from his face, and collapsed back with a soft thud.

Max continued up, straining.
Just one last haul,
he thought. But his arms stopped moving and he held on desperately, unable to continue.

Kata waved frantically. She risked calling out: “Come on!”

Max thought of the trials he had undergone; he thought of the peace he now yearned for. He pulled one last time, reached up, grasped the iron railing, and dragged himself against the wall, scraping his knees. He threw a leg over the railing and fell over it onto the balcony.

A few ludicrously short seconds later Kata squatted down beside him. He closed his eyes. Was there anything she couldn't do?

Opening the glass doors quietly, Kata stepped into the deserted room, which seemed to be the office of some House official. Sweating and breathing heavily, Max followed her. Across the room, an open doorway gave access to a corridor. From far down the passageway, loud voices carried to them. Kata cocked her head, listened, and whispered. “There's a guard in the corridor just outside the doorway.”

Max strained but heard nothing nearer than the chattering voices.

Kata produced a strange implement from her bag: a tube with a spherical container at one end. Light as a dancer, she skipped into the corridor, raised the implement to her lips, and blew. Max followed just in time to see a cloud of crimson dust billow from the tube's end just as someone said, “Hey—”

Kata caught a black-suited female guard before she crashed to the floor. She dragged the unconscious woman into the room and laid her by the desk. Holding up her implement proudly, she whispered, “Haven't used that in a while. Quieter than any other weapon.”

Snatches of conversation drifted down from a doorway at the far end of the corridor, the wing that apparently held Georges's storeroom. “No, it's fantastic. The two factions will wear each other out, but your vigilants will prevail, believe me.”

As they sneaked forward, Kata made no noise at all, but each step of Maximilian's seemed to find a creaky floorboard.

Closer now, the voices traveled to them more clearly. “They say he's always been cold. The thing they don't seem to realize is that he has a mansion up in the Arantine. It's not just officiates and subofficiates, you know. He has allies everywhere: investors from Varenis, foreigners, half the bloody thaumaturgists in the city.”

They crept nearer. Maximilian drew ideograms in the air, spoke the words he knew so well, interlaced the equations just so, and fell into the beautifully lit-up world.

Now invisible, he continued after Kata, who tiptoed forward, light as a cat.

“‘Half' is an exaggeration,” said a rough voice, which Max recognized as Georges's.

“Yes, of course. But, you know,” said the second voice, which Max thought he knew as well.

Kata pressed herself against the wall a foot before the open doorway, on the right-hand side of the corridor, from where the voices carried. She pointed to another large open doorway at the very end of the corridor. Through the opening, Max could see piles of goods packed on shelves and strewn around the floor. A great lock hung open on the door's latch. The two men had been examining the loot, it seemed.

Kata nodded at Max to go ahead. Meanwhile, she pulled the second of her knives from a belt hidden beneath her shirt.

With each of Max's footsteps, the floorboards creaked faintly. He tried to soften them, but it made no difference. As he passed the doorway to his right, he glanced in.

At the head of a grand sculpted table sat Georges, looking as exhausted as he ever had. Lying before him on the desktop were several piles of gold and jewelry, several odd-shaped ancient implements, and a bottle of wine, which he picked up and began to fill two glasses with. “Look, the truth is, we have to accept that people change, but the roles stay the same. Ejan thinks there's a new world being built, but he doesn't realize he's just filling the place of a House Director, really.”

Max shook with disgust. Here was his opportunity for revenge, but it was an opportunity he couldn't take. The alarm would be raised, guards would come running, and he and Kata would be slaughtered.

Behind Georges stood a rough-looking man, a little shorter than average, whose head jutted forward like the spout of a jug. Hanging from his belt was a mean-looking studded mace. Georges had hired himself a bodyguard, it seemed. From the look of him, perhaps a brutalist, one of a group of philosopher-assassins who claimed the world was violent and cruel, and that there was no space for delicate sensibilities. The mace was an expression of this belief: a weapon for crushing and smashing.

On the far side of the table sat Dumas, who was the figure they had seen arriving in the carriage earlier. His great bulldog eyes roved from Georges to the treasure on the table and back again. “He still thinks Caeli-Amur works like the ice-halls—they're damned simple places, you know. For him, there is summer and winter, the ice and the thaw, black and white.”

The floorboards creaked beneath Max's feet again. For a moment the guard frowned and looked directly through the door. Cursing silently, Max continued to walk slowly on.

“It'll be a good thing when he crushes the moderates. Clear the board of a few pieces,” said Georges.

“They'll never amount to much anyway. Too much faith in chitter-chatter. Don't understand that power is all about force,” said Dumas. “At least we're prepared now.”

Max halted in front of the storeroom door, turned around, and stepped back to watch the conversation. The image of Georges and Dumas ahead of him was too much. This was the way the power hungry made their way in the world, swapping favors for favors, coin for coin, rumor for rumor, until they rose up above everyone else, a caste unto themselves, vicious and self-interested. Anger surged within Max. The equations vanished from his mind. He materialized in the doorway, staring at the two corrupt men.

That's what I like to see,
said Aya.

Georges cried out at the sight of Max, leaped back in his chair. The stunned Dumas gaped, mouth open, but the philosopher-assassin guard snapped into action and pushed past Dumas, his mace instantly in hand.

Max stepped back against the corridor wall, raised his arm up to protect himself from the weapon.

“Should I smash him?” The assassin stood in the doorway, his mace above his head, ready to bring it down.

“Please,” said Georges. “He's proving particularly annoying.”

The guard's mace fell to his side loosely, the strength suddenly leached from his body.

“Well, go on,” said Georges, not understanding that it was too late.

The assassin twisted back toward the room, though his legs had lost all strength. Kata held him like a puppet, her face poked over the guard's shoulder. She had stabbed him directly in the heart.

“Hello, friends,” she said. “If you were to cry out, I think I might be able to kill you both before rescue came. So, what are we going to do?”

The two men backed away as the mace dropped to the ground. Kata eased the body down gently.

“Let's work something out, shall we?” said Dumas.

Max seized the mace and pushed quickly past Kata. This time Georges raised an arm to protect himself. Max jabbed the mace into Georges's stomach. The blow sucked the air from the man, whose arms came down to protect his vital organs.

Quickly, Max raised the mace into the air and just as quickly brought it down. There was a terrible crack. A massive depression appeared on the top of Georges's head as his skull gave way. His eyes roved for a moment, looking up and back toward the indentation, and then he collapsed to the ground.

Ooh, good one,
said Aya.
Pity that assassin wasn't around to see it. Confirmation of his philosophy, I'd say.

Dumas dived to one side as one of Kata's knives flew through the air, lodging itself into the table. “Alarm! Help! Intruders! Killers!”

A bell rang. Doors opened and closed. The sound of running echoed down the hall.

Kata pulled Max out of the room. Already guards charged toward them along the corridor, pikes in hand. There would be no escape that way.

They raced into the storeroom. Kata slammed the door shut, slid a bolt into its strike plate, and rapidly pulled a heavy chest against it. Footfalls sounded along the corridor.

“Find the Core. Quick,” Kata said.

The room was vast, filled with goods of all sorts: rugs and decanters, open chests filled with jewelry—all the loot from a war. Windows overlooked the dark lake beneath and the gardens beyond.

Max padded along the aisles, up one, down another, horrified by the stolen wealth. His eyes roved madly: here a row of paintings, there a pile of precious books. Then he saw the Core, lying on a shelf beside its bag. There was still hope.

I can't wait to see how this turns out,
said Aya.
Do you think you'll make it? I don't think so.

“The window, quick.” Kata braced her body against the door just as bodies smashed into the other side. The door shuddered violently as the bolt was torn from it; the chest was driven an inch back.

Max slipped the Core into the bag and slung it over his shoulder. He was almost at the window when Aya came at him, a tidal wave of force. Max dropped to his knees, lost control of his limbs. Once again he was in a deadly struggle. He shuddered and fought, was forced backward by Aya's onward rush. He lost control of his arms and legs, but he held on to the center of his being and his mind. He fell forward clumsily, felt the cold wood smash his face.

“What's wrong with you?” said Kata.

Max was paralyzed. His body trembled from the conflict. His limbs shuddered, wobbled.

—I am the stronger—he said.

That's impossible.

—I am the primary personality. The body knows me, knows my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions, my directions. It is
my
body, and you are but a fragment.

Kata leaped over Max. He lost sight of her, heard a window open. A moment later he felt himself being hauled up. He was balanced on a ledge. Outside the gardens were patches of darkness, the lake beneath him a great black circle.

Another smash. Wood splintered and cracked. The door burst open.

“You'd better wake up, or you'll drown,” said Kata.

Max felt himself fall and hit the water. For a moment he wondered whether the lake was filled with deadly creatures, just like the gardens around them. He held his breath and struck out at Aya once more, but he knew in his heart he had lost.

 

THIRTY-SIX

Lost once more in the subterranean regions of his mind, Max watched the world through Aya's eyes. He lay recovering in the rooms that had once belonged to Technis's Director. Max recalled the flight from the Arbor Palace as he would a dream. They had come up out of the lake, coughing and spluttering up water, still holding the bag with the Core. Aya had been in control of his body and had plunged into the gardens. A blood-orchid had wrapped its whiplike frond around his ankle, dragged him toward its drooling head. Aya had tried to compose a formula to send the flower to sleep, but his strength had been used up by the invisibility charm and the savage struggle with Max, who lay in a dark stupor. Without Kata, they would certainly have died there, but she had arrived in time, cut him free, and led him back to safety.

Aya dressed himself and wandered into the Director's grand office, where the bag with the Core lay on the great desk. Behind the desk stood the egg-shaped memory-catcher, that other reminder of those days when things were falling apart. By the time the ancients had built those things, their paradise had been long disintegrating. The cataclysm had been upon them, the war between Aya and Alerion at its height. All their plans were gone. People scrabbled for escape or distraction. Pastimes and leisure became their sole focus and goal. The real world was coming apart, so they fled to false worlds in the water-spheres or escaped to long-lost memories using machines like the memory-catcher.

Aya threw the Core over his shoulder, happily.
It's time now, Maximilian. Time to free you from my body. It won't be bad. I'm sure we can find a pleasant enough world for you to live in. Well, so long as the power holds out.

By the time Aya reached the great doors that opened up the empire of the Elo-Talern, Max had regained much of his strength. The seditionist caught fragments of Aya's thoughts, knew the mage was worried about his own precarious purchase on the body. But Aya's anger at Alerion and Iria gave him life. Anger was an emotion that gave direction, and the ancient mage began to think again of the world. So Iria had betrayed him. But that had been nearly a thousand years ago, during the breaking of the world. Hadn't he outlasted Alerion and the rest of them? Wasn't that the greatest joke of them all for him, the trickster god? Yes, now he would enjoy himself and take what he needed, beginning with this body.

The great circular door that opened into the realm of the Elo-Talern was massive, dark, and silent. Aya moved his hand across the door in a complex configuration once again, but this time it did not light up or hum. No silver ideograms fell like snowflakes on its surface. Something inside had irrevocably broken.

With intense apprehension, Aya found the hatch, half hidden to the side of the door. With great effort he opened it, revealing a large spoked wheel above him. He grasped the wheel with both hands, but it held fast. So he clambered up, placed his feet on one of the spokes. The whole thing slowly began to rotate. For an instant Max imagined himself to be a giant mouse on a wheel.