The Stars Askew (7 page)

“Let's not play these games.” Rainer finished his own drink and looked at it longingly.

There was silence as Armand tried to gauge the direction of the conversation. Things had become hard to follow, the words spoken with inflections he could not comprehend and filled with mysterious import. He thought about revealing his possession of the prism. That would surely sway Rainer. And yet a feeling of vulnerability kept him silent.

Valentin's birthmark took on an uncomfortable redness. “Anyway, you're partly right. I was born in Caeli-Amur. I still harbor a care toward it. I miss it, even. You should journey there, Rainer—I'll take you one day. The white cliffs, the vast sea, the cafés and philosophy … it would be wrong to ruin all that with war.”

Rainer shifted himself onto his side and faced Armand. “So, Armand, tell me. Are these seditionists corruptible? Can we starve them first and then buy them off later? Would the golden coin light up their idealistic eyes? If so, Valentin might just have me on his side, after all. We would share the profits, wouldn't we, Valentin? The Department of Benevolence and Satisfaction united.”

Armand pressed his lips together momentarily. He felt Valentin looking at him expectantly. He tried to form the words, but Armand could not lie; he simply didn't have it in him. Perhaps it was one of his failings, but principles were all one had. “Starvation might work. They might compromise, but I think there is little chance of corruption among their leaders. They are bound too closely to their ideals.”

Rainer looked at Valentin triumphantly. “You see.”

Valentin closed his eyes slowly, perhaps in disappointment.

Armand leaned forward, seizing the chance to speak. “Varenis has perfected the art of keeping all things in their right places. The reason is simple: you have one central authority, the Directorate, which is able to mediate between competing factions. In Caeli-Amur, the Houses were forever at one another's throats. A benign central authority like the Directorate is what we must impose on Caeli-Amur.”

Rainer shook his head. “No, it seems to me that the belligerents have more reason on their side.” He stood up. “It's nice that you bring these”—he glanced at Armand—“exotic provincials as garnish, but until you can offer me something of actual value, well … until then.”

Rainer heaved himself up from his chair, took one last look at his empty glass, and ambled away.

“He was our only chance, Valentin!” said Dominik. “The others are unmovable. They've built their reputations as belligerents. It's him or no one.”

Valentin sighed. “We'll have to get him another way then. I suppose that's it, then.”

“Shall we find some Trid-Girls?” Dominik ran his hand over the side of his head with long hair. “I feel like—”

“Not tonight, Dominik,” said Valentin. “It's my party in a few days—you will come, won't you, Armand? Why, yes, you must!” Valentin rested his clenched hand on his knee. “You simply must.”

“I'm sorry I failed you, Valentin,” said Armand. “Failed us.”

Valentin put his hand on Armand's knee. “Not at all, my boy. You spoke your mind. Rainer isn't a lost cause yet. He'll be at the party. We can convince him there.”

They went out to the walkway and said good-bye. Armand immediately looked for the figure stalking him, but there was no philosopher-assassin in sight. He knew he had imagined the whole thing.

As he walked away, he heard Dominik whisper to Valentin, “You're not really going to adopt this man, are you?”

“Why not?” Valentin said. “His grandfather and I were the best of friends.”

Dominik laughed cynically. “Yes, yes, of course.”

 

FIVE

Maximilian knew he was in the clutches of a dream. Still he twisted, turned, reached out. The tall robed figure was chasing him through a dark forest. Winter had stripped the trees of their foliage, and they now appeared as ghostly sentinels surrounded by ominous fog. Panic gripped him. He stumbled along overgrown paths, brushes clawing at him, roots tripping him, but he knew he had to continue on, for the thing behind him was a horror he could not face. It meant annihilation.

Exhausted, he finally tripped. The dark robed figure stood above him, a wicked knife in its hand. Max looked up from where he lay. Fear froze his limbs. Beneath the figure's hood, Max saw his own face, cold and dreadful.

Every night it was the same. Even when he knew it was a dream, he felt the same fear as he ran, the same horror at seeing the figure stand over him; he felt the same agony as the figure slipped the knife under his skin and drew out his bloody and still-beating heart.

Max had first seen these terrible images in the terror-spheres of House Technis's dungeons. Then he had been awake, his mind providing the material for the sphere to work on. The visions had stuck with him, sunk deeper into the recesses of his mind, only to burst forth each night until he awoke in the morning, disturbed and fearful.

Like now, as he rolled onto his back and stared up into the darkness of the cavern.

Good morning,
a voice said in his head.

—Go back to sleep—said Max to the voice.

I awake when you do, and sleep when you do. If you want me to sleep, you need to go back to sleep.

Max clenched his teeth. Was the voice really the memory of the joker god Aya that he had somehow allowed into his head in the Great Library of Caeli-Enas, the Sunken City? He knew now there had been no gods: the ancients had been people, just like the rest of them. After the cataclysm, they had seemed as gods to those remaining in the broken world.

Max shielded his reflections from the voice, but he felt it probing at him, trying to uncover those thoughts. He slapped Aya away. —Leave me alone.

The voice retreated to a marginal place somewhere inside him.

Max sat up and looked around the Communal Cavern that had been the seditionist hideout before House Technis raided the place. In the lamplight, the place was dark, shadowy. To one side, doors opened like black maws in the gloom. One of the geometrical rooms inside had been Max's workshop, where he had taught others thaumaturgy; another room had housed Ejan's workshop, where he had built explosive devices. All that was left was strewn across the ground, like flotsam on the shore after a storm: ragged clothes, broken glass, bloody stains where seditionists had died.

Max could barely remember the sequence of events: dragging his air-cart along the watery boulevards of Caeli-Enas, crabs scuttling along the cobblestones, fish darting around his feet, and the leviathan—the thought of it sent shudders into him—waiting there for him, spying him with its hundreds of roving eyes, ready to wrap him in its deadly tentacles. Then the conversation with the sentient Library beneath the oceans; the deal he made with Aya to escape the underwater world. From there the memories became even more fragmented: snatches in the ultramarine and emerald of the underwater world; bursting from the waters, gasping for air under the glittering lights of Caeli-Amur; staggering back to the seditionist base, this awful second personality in his head. Kata had looked down at him—Kata! The thought of her charged him with surprising emotion—then the House Technis guards had arrived, and he'd been dragged off to the dungeons.

Don't forget: I provided you with the knowledge to swim through the water,
said Aya.

The headache grew like a little tumor in Max's head. His memories were half ruined. At times they weren't even his own. Every now and again pieces of him broke away and merged with Aya; at other times, fragmentary memories from times long gone flashed into his mind, and he realized they had come from Aya.

—I wish I'd never allowed you into my head, not for all the thaumaturgical sciences in the world—Max thought.

Aya laughed.
You're only saying that. Who wouldn't want me inside them?

Nearby, Max's oldest friend, Omar, lay asleep, his scarred face like that of a small injured animal. Both of them had been in bad shape after the raid, and at first Max could not leave Omar's side. Once the worst had passed, Max's mood had kept him in the hideout. Some part of him feared rejoining the seditionists, facing up to the failure of his mission to the Sunken City. He had dreamed he would be a leader of the overthrow of the Houses, but it had occurred without him. How stupid he had been! He saw now that his arrogance had blinded him to real events, to the real structures of power. Defeat lay heavy on him, and yet he was still committed to seditionism: he still cared for the lost and the dispossessed. He cared for slaves taken against their will, for the orphans in the factory quarter, and for the workers broken by brutal conditions. These things still filled him with anger, and now that his egotism had been stripped away, that anger burned more purely.

Max picked up a pouch of florens that the seditionists had hidden in the cave before the raid. He counted them briefly: there were enough to last several weeks, even with the inflation that had gripped the city in the face of shortages. He then left Omar and walked along the pathway to the city, emerging high up on the mountain on which the city was perched. Max drew a deep breath, amazed once more by the sight. For a moment it seemed like nothing had changed. Two headlands reached out to either side like arms reaching out into the sea. By the docks, far away, he could spy the Opera building and Market Square. Beyond them, the wide blue ocean sparkled in the light, a multitude of whitecaps as far as Max could see. Out there beneath the waves lay the Sunken City.

Caeli-Amur had changed subtly, though. There was less smoke pumping from the factory quarter that lay between him and the Northern Headland. There were fewer steam-trams on the busy streets. He sensed some molecular change in the atmosphere, a tension that hung over the city and the figures moving around it.

Aya said,
Look at the smoke pumping into the air. You've ruined the city.

Max felt Aya searching around in his memories. In a panic, Max walled them up.

How am I supposed to learn anything about this world if you won't let me know what you know?

—I don't want you shuffling around in my head, picking out this and that as if my memories are a chest of bric-a-brac.

I wanted to learn more about Iria—things you might have learned as a child but have forgotten.

—I've told you all I know.

The notion that there might be things in Max's mind he'd forgotten perturbed him. The idea that Aya might discover them perturbed him even more.

According to legend, Iria had retreated from the world after the other gods' victory over her lover, Aya. In Sentinel Tower, hidden away in the mountains, she had eked away her final years, having chosen mortality rather than the eternal life of the gods. The pain, they said, was too great for her to bear.

Tell me again,
said Aya.

Max drew in a deep breath. —She's gone. All the ancients are gone.

He felt Aya's grief. Like Max, Aya was also caught in the sense of the inexorable passing of time, the feeling that things could never go back to the way they were.

Aya possessed the language of the unified theory of thaumaturgy. For almost a thousand years this language had been lost, and thaumaturgy had been fragmented, each discipline developing on its own. But this forgotten primary language—this mathematics—functioned in all of reality: both the land of life and the Other Side, the land of death. The language had its own costs, but it allowed the thaumaturgist to use the Art without the Other Side flowing into them, distorting them.

And that was something Max needed. He had risked too much for it—he would brook no opposition from the second personality in his head. The question was: How could he access it without Aya's consent?

They arrived at the great, black, steaming, clunking tower, and climbed the dark stone steps, ready to take the cable car down to the Opera in Market Square.

*   *   *

Hundreds of golden globes danced on the Opera's entry-hall ceiling. As Max entered, they froze. A second later they descended as one toward him. Floating down, they changed color to a bright gold, illuminating the hall in a flood of light. When they reached him, they began to spin around him, a whirlwind of dancing, flickering lights circling him.

The hundreds of citizens who had been milling about or lining up in long queues stared at the lights, which now pulsed with energy.

Hello, my little ones,
said Aya.

“Get away.” Maximilian waved his hands at the lights, some of which playfully danced around his hands. “Away.”

Aya pushed an equation up toward Max, who grasped it and invoked it silently. The lights rushed back up to the roof, where they resumed their dance, this time slightly less energetically.

Not even a thanks?

—Are you always this narcissistic?—said Max.

I might ask you the same question.

Wide-eyed citizens parted in front of Maximilian as he strode to the main reception desk. He recognized the old pinch-faced Antoine, working as one of the intendants behind the desk. Antoine had been one of the first generations of seditionists led by Markus. These older types had been surpassed by the following generation, who had been swayed by leaders of the three new factions: Aceline, Ejan, and Maximilian. After Markus had been expelled from the seditionist group, the other older ones had broken and drifted aimlessly, or aligned themselves with one of the new factions. So history had marched on. Antoine had sided with Aceline, but like most of that older generation, he had lost a sense of his own ideas, a sense of certainty.

Antoine's awestruck face seemed even more pinched as he stared at Max. “We all thought you had disappeared in the Technis dungeons!”

“Who? Kata? Oewen or Ariana? Clemence?”

Antoine shook his head. “Ejan will explain it all, Max. Come with me.”