The Stars Askew (5 page)

Despite his fears, the night passed quietly. Well before sunrise, Armand slipped from the roadhouse and rode rapidly to the northern gate of Scaptia. Though he hated to do it to the poor animal, he drove Ice more quickly than before.

What had these poor creatures done to be caught up in the sordid world of people and politics? These fine animals were more simple and noble than humans; they did as their nature demanded; they were incapable of the cruelty, mendacity, or vindictiveness of the kind of mob rule that had helped seditionism take hold in Caeli-Amur. It was clear to Armand that seditionist freedom meant tyranny: tyranny of the mob, tyranny of the lowest forms of culture. The more equitable things became, the more the crudest sensibilities ruled. What did they seek out as entertainment? The sordid spectacles of the Arena, cheap ale and dirty drugs, immoral sexual escapades. All things beautiful and delicate would be drowned by these base tastes, this recrudescence of sewerage.

The horse continued, uncomplaining, and by midmorning the rugged hills to the west gave way to the Keos Pass. He thought of taking the road that branched left through the pass, and approaching Varenis the long way. The assassin would not expect such a turn, but Armand knew it would be a foolish plan.

As he rode into the afternoon, the site came more and more into focus. Weird light refracted off the horizon. Its undertones were gray, but luminous greens and violets flickered on the surface. Closer to him, shimmering pools hovered above the landscape like ethereal lakes. Nearer still, he glimpsed bubbling puddles of dark violet and viridian liquids. At the edge of the site, or perhaps within it, he could see the ruins of a town shimmering and wavering, the windows of haunted buildings black and empty. Some of the buildings had crumbled; others stood resisting whatever bizarre forces were at work on them.

Armand came to another roadhouse near the wasteland site. He considered riding on, but thought of his brave horse, Ice, and decided against it. That night the hooded man from the night before slipped into the common room and sat in the corner. Armand once again fled to his room, anxiety slipping around in his stomach like a cold snake. So the days passed: Armand setting off early; the figure following him but never able to catch him on the road, for Ice was too fast and strong. Armand retreated to his room as soon as he saw the figure, whose face was always hidden in shadow, until Armand felt there might be no face there at all, just a chasm of darkness. Once Armand caught sight of a red beard and a straight nose. He became even more terrified, for now the shadow took on a real and deadly form.

With the Keos Pass behind him, the road wound between two chains of ever taller hills. Some three days from Varenis, he stopped Ice for a moment after the road curled gently around a slope. Before him stood the immense Palian wall. Its half-ruined grandeur rooted him to the spot, and he felt the wonder and glory of the ancients. The wall rose up forty or fifty stories, sections missing from its upper reaches that had been blown apart during the war of the gods. High behind the wall, little clouds rushed across the blue sky, and Armand got vertigo from the contrast of the towering wall and the stratosphere behind.

Vast cracks ran from the wall's crumbled edges toward its base. It looked like a giant cracked plate, but he brushed the absurd idea aside. Built into cliffs on each side of the valley, two ancient deserted towers rose at least twenty stories higher than the wall.

Armand rode through the gigantic gate, past a checkpoint guarded by Varenis's troops. Cyclops auxiliaries to the troops camped nearby sat around a fire. One stared at him with its single beady eye, and Armand averted his gaze.

A few minutes later Armand pulled his weary horse to a standstill. He dismounted and gazed over the vast plain of Al-Varen, all the way across to Varenis.

*   *   *

The first sight of Varenis—sometimes simply called “the City”—is said to represent one of the momentous events of a person's life. In front of Armand lay the vast plain, littered with farms and villas, waterways and crisscrossing canals. On the western side of the Etolian Mountains, the rain fell heavily, and the landscape was lush. Shrouded in smoke and fog, Varenis rose like some mystic's vision shimmering in the light at the center of the plain. Its suburbs rolled out around it like lava from a volcano, steaming and smoking. Farther in, Armand could glimpse buildings fifteen, twenty, thirty stories tall, walkways and train lines cutting in between them like threads of a spider's web. And finally, covered by smoke and soot, barely visible at the City's epicenter, stood the Twelve Towers of Varenis, impossibly tall. There was one tower for each of the legendary Sortileges, the thaumaturgist rulers who hovered above the cityscape like hawks over their prey.

The sight of Varenis filled Armand with hope. Somewhere in that massive metropolis lived Karl Valentin, who had once been Armand's grandfather's protégé. When Armand's grandfather had been exiled from House Arbor, Valentin had chosen not to remain in his home city of Caeli-Amur. Instead he moved to Varenis, where he had made his name. Armand's father had told him,
If ever you should visit the City, you must see Karl Valentin at the Department of Benevolence. He will look after you
. Armand hoped Valentin would be his passage into the Directorate that ruled over Varenis.

Armand glanced back to where the assassin was passing through the checkpoint beneath the wall.

Armand remounted Ice and whispered, “Let's go,” into the horse's ear.

It took Armand a day to cross the plain, the assassin ever behind him. Finally the outskirts of the city drew near: slums punctuated by wealthier sections composed of large town houses. Looking back, Armand saw that his pursuer had closed on him. The decisive moment was at hand. Armand kicked Ice into a gallop. Over his shoulder, he saw the assassin race after him. Fear shot through Armand: his aching arms shook, his legs trembled. Ice dashed past buildings, sped around carts and pedestrians.

“Hey! Look out!” cried a pedestrian.

Ice galloped farther and longer than Armand could have hoped for, until they were deep inside the city. When he looked back, the pursuer had been left far behind. Finally Ice slowed to a walk and Armand breathed out. After the long harrowing journey, he was safe from the killer.

Before long, the streets were filled with steam-trams and rickshaws ducking in front of one another, fighting over space. Every now and then, a train on one of the tracks curving through the sky would burst out of a tunnel. Moments later the train would plunge into another tunnel like a serpent going into its hole. Ice became jittery but held his nerve. The road rose up on tall columns, passed into a building, and became some kind of arcade, storefronts on both sides offering spiced soups, designer clothes, alcoholic berry-drinks, and takeaway flower-liquors. It emerged from the other side as a walkway once more, hundreds of feet above the city.

Rickety-looking elevators climbed up the sides of the buildings or descended into holes below the ground, for the buildings had lower levels extending deep beneath the surface of the earth: Varenis's famous Undercity. Everywhere, chimneys spewed out smoke and soot, and the very ground beneath Armand's feet seemed to vibrate from the churning of faraway engines. The entire city seemed to Armand like some gigantic creature, puffing and heaving and shuddering and rumbling, its populace like minuscule blood cells passing along its vast circulatory system. His head swooned with vertigo from the size of it all; his stomach lurched with a fear that this creature might devour him.

Onward he rode, closer and closer to the Twelve Towers, moving through the crowds who hurried this way and that. Whole flocks of them passed like birds; no one had any interest in him at all. The crowds frightened him as much as the city itself, not only their cold indifference—the way their eyes slipped over him as if he were nothing—but the sheer variety of them. They were garbed in all kinds of unusual and gaudy colors—purples, lime greens—and patterns that disoriented the eye. Others had shaved heads or strangely asymmetrical hair colors and styles.

Now and then the walkways would open up onto tiny squares—some perched on top of buildings—housing verdant gardens filled with trees and stones coated in moss and lichen, where lovers sat beneath tiny arbors or crossed miniature bridges over delicate ponds. This sudden beauty in the bustling city surprised and encouraged Armand. As he rested briefly in one of the gardens, a torrential rain began. Many of the people around him threw hoods over their heads and began to rush along the streets. Others opened umbrellas, which Armand had only ever seen in that strange image brought to Technis by one of the officiates returning from Varenis. A daguerreotype—that was what the officiate had called it.

*   *   *

The Department of Benevolence was housed in a giant gray block that rose up, massive and monolithic, on one side of the Plaza of the Sun. Armand left Ice in one of the long rows of stables and entered a cavernous hall, its roof lost in the darkness above. Far away, a man worked behind a massive desk set on a dais, stamping papers, moving them from one side of the desk to another, and periodically reaching up to open one of many cylinders, which descended on wires from the gloom above like spiders. From these he unrolled papers, which he added to his various piles or signed, stamped, and sent back up one of the cylinders.

Armand's footfalls echoed around the reaches of the room so that he seemed to be surrounded by a hundred invisible figures marching beside him. “Excuse me,” said Armand.

The man shifted his pince-nez on his nose and continued to work.

Armand waited a moment then cleared his throat. “I'm Officiate Armand Lecroisier from Caeli-Amur. I've come to speak with Controller Valentin.”

The man looked down at Armand over his pince-nez. He had the air of a schoolmaster disturbed by an irritating child. “I don't care if you're one of the Sortileges themselves. One cannot simply walk into the Department and demand an audience with the Controller.”

“I am an officiate of House Technis,” said Armand brusquely. “Valentin is a friend. He is expecting me.” He immediately regretted adding this plaintive coda, which made it sound as if he had lost his nerve.

The man looked coldly at him. “Wait.” The man then took a blank sheet, picked up a quill, wrote something on it, and pulled a cord above him. Immediately a cylinder dropped from the darkness. He placed the paper within it, pulled yet another cord, and the cylinder whizzed off into the shadows above.

The man then returned to his work.

Eventually another cylinder dropped from above. The man opened the metal container, pulled out the paper within, read it, stamped it, and gestured into the darkness to the right. “Elevator Nine.”

An attendant in front of Elevator Nine opened the grate as Armand approached. The elevator rose for a long time, the attendant standing stock-still beside him, like a statue. Armand smiled to himself: it seemed that people knew who they were in Varenis,
what
they were, and—like this attendant—were happy. The problem with much of the new world was the ceaseless mobility, the shifting social strata. People became lost in the tumult, consumed with anxiety and distress at the uncertainty of it all. And there were those who called for even greater freedom of movement! Seditionism was the nadir of this line of thought. The gods knew Armand had felt that anxiety himself, even as he had reached Varenis. But he still wondered if he would find his rightful place with Valentin above.

 

FOUR

The attendant led Armand along a narrow walkway that jutted out into the Varenis sky. At the end of the walkway, a lone square room afforded a magnificent view of the Plaza of the Sun. Standing beside a vast desk was a gray-haired man, his face warm and inviting. Despite his perfectly cut suit, his slicked-back wiry hair, and his closely shaved, rugged face, he had the look of a long-lost uncle who would adopt everyone as his own. A deep red birthmark on one side of his face gave his good looks a unique spoiled quality.

“Armand Lecroisier, the grandson of my oldest and dearest friend?” He shook his head in disbelief.

“Yes, it is I,” said Armand stiffly.

Valentin smiled brilliantly and embraced Armand warmly. “Armand! Why, yes, you look just like him when he was young. I'd never forget that nose, and you've the same tall, willowy build—like a wading bird. So aristocratic, I always thought.”

“Too few recognize such traits now. Those born to rule ride alone and bereft, while the masses rise to positions they could never fill. The world is turned upside down, in Caeli-Amur at least.” Armand stood back from the embrace.

“Yes, yes, you speak the truth. We're worried, you know. There is consternation about events there, much debate about how to respond. Still, it's wonderful that you're here. Now we will have an eyewitness, and you'll be terrific support for our policies. Come, sit down.” Valentin led him to a series of couches in a semicircle, with a view of the Twelve Towers standing in a massive square, overshadowing everything. Armand placed his bag on the floor beside him, feeling suddenly vulnerable without it.

“Tell me about everything, Armand. The Houses overthrown? That seems impossible.” Valentin gestured widely with his arms, inviting Armand to unburden himself.

The words tumbled from Armand's mouth as he recounted events in Caeli-Amur: the strikes and demonstrations, the clashes at the university, the rise of Director Autec, and finally the disaster of Aya's Day—the entire sorry sequence of events leading up to the overthrow of the old system.

“Together we will convince the Director to send Varenis's legions,” Armand said. “We must dig this rebellion out before it has a chance to take root.”

“Ah, yes. Well, my dear boy, things are more complicated than you might expect. You see, there is no Director at the moment. The last one … well, his failure to foresee events in Caeli-Amur has resulted in his removal. In two weeks the Council of the Directorate will meet to decide on its nomination for a new Director. Our task is to ensure that the nominated person is one of our friends.”