The Stars Askew (24 page)

Still the crowd hummed and waved their rags in the air. The blood-orchids joined them, singing in a deep thrumming tone, its rhythmic bass so like the hums of the worshippers.

“You don't have to,” said the Pilgrim. “Come with me and alleviate your suffering.”

A jubilant savagery was fixed on Karol's face. He leaped to his feet, raised his hands in the air. “Feed them!”

A group of crow-people leaped up, grasped the struggling Aya and the Pilgrim, and dragged them from the stage. The crowd parted, leaving a space between the two rows of blood-orchids, which quivered as they sang.

Aya and the Pilgrim were thrown onto the ground between the two rows. As they scrambled from the dirt, the crow-people backed away, forming lines at each end of the strange forum to keep their prisoners trapped between the flowers.

—Blood-orchids can't move, so we should be out of range of their petioles for the moment—said Max.

Aya seized the Pilgrim's arm, and they began to back away toward the Tower's door, where the line of flapping crow-people waited for them, humming in some feverish fury. Several ran toward them, then backed away again.

Aya and the Pilgrim froze, for the orchids wrenched themselves from the ground, their tuberous roots acting like two clubbed feet. One after the other they came, breaking from their beds and shuffling toward Aya and the Pilgrim, their stamens quivering at the scent of flesh.

—Oh no—he's right. They've evolved somehow—said Max.

The Pilgrim fell to his knees, shaking now. He could sense the impending attack. Soon the orchids would drag them close, envelop them in their petals. The orchids had desires. They would suck on blood and bone.

Aya scrambled around in his memories, searched for the prime language, the base equations for organic matter. But he could not find them.

—Do something—Max said, panicking.

Shut up. I'm trying to concentrate.
Again Aya riffled through his memories. Where were the equations? What were the words and grammar? Where was anything?

In that moment Max gained a sharp view of Aya's fragmented mind. The missing years, the missing knowledge, the missing parts of the prime language—segments of him had been lost in the transfer to Max's body. Perhaps other parts had been lost even before that, in the Library of Caeli-Enas. There was no denying it: the greatest of Magi, the jester god Aya, was a fractured relic of his former self.

—You don't have them. You don't know the prime language.

A petiole whipped past Aya's neck. The flowers continued toward them, step by ungainly step, goaded by the maddening drone of the crow-people.

Give me a moment.
Aya dredged from his mind other grammatical structures, words that applied not to flora but to animals. He conjugated them differently. The syntax was all jumbled, but he covered the silences with yet more equations. As he cobbled together this crippled version of the Art, the world lit up as the deep structures of things revealed themselves.

Max had experienced this immanence before, but this time it had a different quality. Behind the world of life lay the world of darkness, the Other Side. Superimposed on this one, he saw the rise of a hill, a set of stairs cut into it, running off at a subtle and oblique angle. This ancient Art was the language of the deep structures of the world of life and the world of death combined. For a moment he existed in both.

Aya felt the orchids' dumb sentience. Through him, Max experienced their plant thoughts, felt the movements of the air on their leaves and whiplike petioles, sensed their surroundings as they did: through touch. They saw their latest meal in front of them. They yearned for it, trembled and quivered for it, sang for it.

Aya reached into their minds, rearranged their thoughts. It was a clumsy process. He was forced to throw equations around like a juggler. But, somehow, draining his strength with each hurried invocation, he reached the orchids.

One after another, the carnivorous flowers halted. One started to shake uncontrollably, its mind unable to process its contradictory desires. Another wilted rapidly, as if a month had passed without feeding. The others stood stock-still, frozen.

Their songs died.

At that moment Max realized he could take back control of his mind and body. He could strike at Aya while the mage was in his trance, engulfed in the Art. Max readied himself, saw Aya's concentration elsewhere, his tenuous grip on his inner functions. But Max held back, afraid of the consequences.

Holding the orchids in place, his hands held out as if to physically stop them, Aya turned to the aghast crowd, whose faces stared at this man who could control the orchids. “You are a false king, Karol. These orchids are nothing but plants. The Pilgrim here is right: there is a universe beneath us all, a force that connects us, which
is
to be worshipped, if anything is to be worshipped at all. If you seek some kind of salvation, follow the Pilgrim.”

At this, Karol cried out. The bulk of his lieutenants hummed frantically, but the orchids did not respond.

Aya reached into their minds and put them to sleep, as if they faced a long cold winter. They shrank into themselves, the petals closing over their stamens, their heads drooping to the ground like chastised children. They would not wake.

The immanence faded, along with the perception of the Other Side. Aya was finished with the Art for the moment, but Max knew the Art was not yet finished with him.

Some of the crow-people now fell to their knees in supplication. Others ran from the hall, their faith in tatters, or perhaps they were unable to assimilate these new events. Yet others gathered around Karol and his remaining lieutenants, who backed away.

Karol staggered from the stage toward Aya and the Pilgrim. There was no energy in his body; each step seemed to take something out of him. His roving eyes were filled with desolation, shifting at times into resignation, then back to sadness. He passed close to Aya and stared at the mage. The skin around his bloodshot eyes sagged, revealing a line of red flesh beneath. He gazed balefully at Aya for a second, then continued through the door.

A short while later only a few of the crow-people remained. Aya stepped across to the stage and leaned against it, exhausted from his use of the Art. This was one of the highest costs of thaumaturgy, but it was Aya's clear separation from events that shocked Max. Aya looked at the people around him from an Olympian distance, some faraway place where Karol and the crow-people's concerns were but tiny specs in the vast seas of infinity. This was the cost of the prime language. Max built a wall against it.

The distance will pass eventually, but you never quite return to the place where you began. It will stay with you, like a scar. That's the cost,
said Aya.

The Pilgrim came to sit on the stage beside Aya. “Perhaps
you
are the prophet. You have halted entropy here; perhaps
you're
meant to lead the movement against the coming apocalypse. Perhaps
you
are the one we've been waiting for.”

Aya elbowed the Pilgrim's ribs. “Or perhaps I'm a joker sent to test you.”

The Pilgrim's head fell forward, a mirror image of the blood-orchids. “I am beset with doubts.” He placed his hands over the bandages covering his eyes. “I wish I could still see. This was all a mistake.”

Aya looked at the man impassively. “Perhaps, but what is there to do but to go on?”

Some part of the Pilgrim broke. He stood up. “I will march to the Teeming Cities, and there I will spread the word of the coming apocalypse. There I will tell the world that we must change our ways, and prepare for it. For we must survive it, I see now. Somehow, we must survive it. Who would come with me?”

A hundred or so flapped their rags and hummed in agreement.

That night the Pilgrim sat up with his new followers, and they discussed the apocalyptic philosophy. Aya drifted in and out of sleep on a pile of rags nearby.

In the morning Aya put his hands on the Pilgrim's shoulders. “I hope you reach the Teeming Cities and fulfill your mission, whatever that is.”

“And I hope you reach your own destination. But remember, we rarely find what we search for,” said the Pilgrim.

—You like him—said Max.

He has the strength of his convictions. How could you not admire that?

Aya left the Pilgrim with his people, and led his horse from the plaza toward the northwest road. To his right, a single tear-flower cried mournfully, like a lost child. Again, the urge to lie down beside it gripped Aya. He fought it off as he approached the body, lying beneath a now silent tear-flower. Already, nectar covered the man, and several of the aerial roots had implanted themselves into it, reaching into the flesh beneath.

Aya squatted beside Karol, looked into the dreamy eyes that stared into a faraway world.

“It's not so bad, you know,” said Karol. “It hurts at first, but then you start to feel the wind on your petals; you understand things you didn't previously. You come to know that the world isn't simply constructed for humans, that there are other rhythms, other perceptions. It's a great release, you know. A relief, that distance.”

“I know that distance,” said Aya.

Karol closed his eyes, opened them again. “I am not sorry for what I've done. I am sorry for the rest of you though.”

Karol closed his eyes but did not open them again.

Aya led his horse along the northwest boulevard and through the ruins of Lixus. Before long, he knew, he would be out of the city and into the hills. There he would find Iria's Tower. The thought pierced him like a spike. What would he find there? Would the Sentinel Tower be in ruins? Would Iria herself lie there, or perhaps her bony remains?

Iria,
Aya thought.
How I loved you.

Hidden inside his own mind, Max felt a quick surge of optimism. He knew now that Aya was not only a mage, not only a joker, but that he was human. He'd saved the Pilgrim. In fact, he liked the apocalyptic. And he had loved Iria. There was good in him, after all, and if there was good in him, there was hope for the both of them.

 

NINETEEN

No matter how many florens Kata and Dexion showered on people in the Quaedian, no one could tell them of Henri's fate. Kata had to restrain the minotaur, whose anger and grief threatened to spill over into violence. “I'll break them with my bare hands,” Dexion repeated again and again. In these moments he seemed to grow to twice his size, violent energy threatening to burst through him. At other times, Kata might have been afraid of this explosive passion. It only took one glance for passersby in the street to back away from his fierce mien.

How incendiary his emotions are,
she thought. Something had shifted in her own feelings as well. Where once she would have felt only despair, now it was mixed with anger, too. Vengeance—that was what she sought. She wasn't the only one. As they searched for Henri, she had been vaguely aware that news of Thom's death had led to more marches and more riots.

Three days after they found Thom's body, they decided Henri was gone for good. That night Kata curled up with the minotaur for comfort, wrapped her arms around his massive torso, and listened to his breathing. In the morning Kata's eyes felt as though they were filled with sand. The urchin had been her chance at redemption. In her mind, he had come to stand in for her own childhood, as if somehow by keeping him safe she were keeping that little lost girl safe too.

She rolled over on her bed, stared through the window at the blue sky. She was being drawn back, she knew, to her childhood and youth. She was being drawn back to her mentor, Sarrat.

She left Dexion asleep and dragged herself up and into the threatening streets, expecting at any moment to be attacked or killed. She willed her enemies on. She wanted to face them, even if they were shapeshifters who burned faces with their thaumaturgy. This morning, even the rangy cats scuttling along the alleyways looked meaner than before, ready for a scrap.

Not far from Via Gracchia, a small apartment nestled away from the bustling city. The small white houses in the area pressed up against one another, and against the cobblestone streets. But this house stood alone, with an exquisite pebbled garden and rugged desert plants circling three of its sides. She remembered the first time the Technis official had brought her here. How frightened and excited she had been: a philosopher-assassin was about to adopt her. No longer would she sleep on the streets. Now she could
really
live. She remembered that trembling little girl with pity. That child hadn't yet learned that though she might be able to escape the streets, she couldn't escape herself.

Kata took a deep breath and strode toward the sliding door, where she stopped, slipped off her boots, and knocked three times.

“Come in, Kata,” a voice called out from within. It annoyed her that he still recognized her footsteps.

Kata stepped into the sparse central room and, without speaking, crossed to where Sarrat sat cross-legged. She sat opposite him, cursing to herself as she did so. She wasn't here to comply with his practices, and yet she behaved much as she did when she was his apprentice.

Sarrat's head was shaved, austere like his house and gardens. The man's olive skin was smooth, and he had an ageless quality. He might have been anywhere between thirty or fifty, with only a broken nose disfiguring his unwrinkled perfection.

For a long time they sat facing each other without speaking. Kata felt the rush of shame and discomfort wash over her, as if all her sins were there for him to see.

“I was wondering when you'd return,” said Sarrat.

Kata didn't respond immediately, but when Sarrat simply looked at her, she spoke to break the discomfort. “I've done contentious things. I'm not sure who I am, exactly.”

“Have you ever known who you are?”